Defining Olympic success

The Beijing Games were dazzling, but were they worth the steep price?

China got precisely what if wanted out of the Beijing Olympics, said the Los Angeles Times in an editorial. It paid more than $41 billion, and reaped a mountain of gold medals, along with international approval despite its human rights abuses. “Yet what planners in Beijing miscalculated is that no matter how well you teach performers to smile, the strain behind the lips is still detectable.”

After China’s “super-coordinated” extravaganza, said Anne Applebaum in The Washington Post, the 2012 Games should be delightfully messy. Londoners will grouse about the traffic, politicians will carp about money, the notoriously “snarky” British press will call the ceremonies “tasteless”—but protesters won’t be intimidated, and everyone will have “a lot more fun.”

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